"To know that these people knew all of this music and were interested in how I played it, that was such a thrill," he told us in 2008, on the 50th anniversary of his appearance in Moscow. But he told interviewers that he didn't feel he had conquered anything he had simply played Russian music in a way that touched Russian souls. "He didn't fit the evil image of capitalists that had been painted for us by the Soviet government."Ĭliburn won the International Tchaikovsky Competition, against all odds and expectations, and came home to a ticker-tape parade, like a triumphant general. "Van looked and played like some kind of angel," the Russian pianist Andrei Gavrilov told a Cliburn biographer. When he sat down to play, Russians saw a tall, 23-year-old Texan, rail thin and tousle-haired, with great, gangly fingers that grew evocative and eloquent when he played the music of the true Russian masters - Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, and Borodin.Ĭliburn died Wednesday at his home in Fort Worth, Texas. He went to Moscow in 1958 for the first International Tchaikovsky Competition.
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